I asked Kersten England, the eldest of Lingard’s three daughters, whether her family’s character traits were recognisable in Sadie.<\/p>\n
“I think there might be bits of us,” she said. “We were all energetic, lively, quite bright.”<\/p>\n
Kersten described how her mother grew up in east Belfast. <\/p>\n
Lingard’s own mother was a Christian Scientist.<\/p>\n
Kersten said that meant her mother “always had a sense of not being either Catholic or Protestant, and being in some senses an observer of all these debates that were going on”.<\/p>\n
The novelist spent most of her life living in Edinburgh and faced some hostility because of the issues in the books. <\/p>\n
Kersten remembers she “had the odd razor blade through the post”.<\/p>\n
Publishers also weren’t initially sure about the commercial prospects for the novels.<\/p>\n
Kersten explained: “They used to say, don’t talk about sex, politics or religion. She was going for two of them.”<\/p>\n
But the series became a huge success, selling more than 1.3 million copies worldwide.<\/p>\n
The three other novels in the series focus on Kevin and Sadie’s lives after they leave Northern Ireland, finishing with Hostages to Fortune, published in 1976.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I asked Kersten England, the eldest of Lingard’s three daughters, whether her family’s character traits were recognisable in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-90983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}